Politics

WASHINGTON — Congress approved legislation to finance the Department of Homeland Security for another week as Democrats and Republicans continue to spar over President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration policy.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama intends to follow through this week on his threatened veto of a bill that would permit construction of the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline without administrative approval.

LITTLE ROCK — An Arkansas state senator posted comments to Facebook over the weekend advocating the use of nuclear weapons against the Sunni militant group in Iraq and Syria that calls itself the Islamic State.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — The scene in the New Hampshire office is one common to any nascent U.S. presidential campaign in the state that holds the country’s first primary contest: Young staffers peck away at laptops and unpack boxes of signs with their candidate’s name.

WASHINGTON — Republicans exploring a 2016 White House run are pounding away at President Barack Obama’s strategy for stopping Islamic State militants but, wary of Americans’ war fatigue, are so far providing few specifics on what they would do differently.

WASHINGTON — The Senate last week approved legislation to permit construction of the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline after a month of largely partisan debate over climate change and energy independence.

LITTLE ROCK — Gov. Asa Hutchinson said last week he wants the state Legislature to move away from what has become a yearly debate over the so-called private option and take a longer view of health-care reform.

LITTLE ROCK — The state Ethics Commission on Friday dismissed a complaint against Attorney General Leslie Rutledge that alleged she violated state campaign finance laws by appearing in an outside group’s ad.

CONWAY — The candidates for Arkansas’ 2nd District congressional seat presented diverging views on health care, the minimum wage and other topics in a debate Monday on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas.

CONWAY — U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor and U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton sought to portray each other as loyal to non-Arkansans during their first debate Monday, with Pryor claiming Cotton answers to out-of-state billionaires and Cotton accusing Pryor of being in lockstep with President Barack Obama.

LITTLE ROCK — In an election year that has seen outside groups spend millions in Arkansas, some candidates for state offices have talked about placing new limits on what those groups can do to influence the state’s elections.

LITTLE ROCK — An email sent by Republican attorney general candidate Leslie Rutledge while she was a state Department of Human Services employee in 2007 was criticized as racist Thursday by the state Democratic Party after it surfaced on a liberal blog.

A large crowd, including members of the general public as well as local, state and national officials, gathered for a Senate campaign rally in support of U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton , R-Dardanelle, in downtown Fort Smith on Thursday.

OKLAHOMA CITY — At their debate last week, Gov. Mary Fallin and her Democratic opponent, Joe Dorman, had a rare moment of agreement in their opinion that the Oklahoma Legislature should set the state’s budget on a two-year cycle, instead of the current annual basis.

LITTLE ROCK — The chairman of the state Republican Party filed a complaint Tuesday with the Arkansas Ethics Commission alleging that Democratic attorney general candidate Nate Steel improperly used property purchased with public funds for campaign purposes.